MIMO (multi-input multi-output) technology corresponds to a technology for increasing data transmission and reception efficiency using a plurality of transmission antennas and a plurality of reception antennas instead of using a single transmission antenna and a single reception antenna. If a single antenna is used, a receiving end receives data through a single antenna path. On the contrary, if multiple antennas are used, the receiving end receives data through several paths, thereby enhancing transmission speed and transmission capacity and increasing coverage.
A single-cell MIMO operation can be divided into a single user-MIMO (SU-MIMO) scheme that a single user equipment (UE) receives a downlink signal in a single cell and a multi user-MIMO (MU-MIMO) scheme that two or more UEs receive a downlink signal in a single cell.
Channel estimation corresponds to a procedure of restoring a received signal by compensating a distortion of the signal distorted by fading. In this case, the fading corresponds to a phenomenon of rapidly changing strength of a signal due to multi-path time delay in wireless communication system environment. In order to perform the channel estimation, it is necessary to have a reference signal known to both a transmitter and a receiver. The reference signal can be simply referred to as an RS (reference signal) or a pilot depending on a standard applied thereto.
A downlink reference signal corresponds to a pilot signal for coherently demodulating PDSCH (physical downlink shared channel). PCFICH (physical control format indicator channel), PHICH (physical hybrid indicator channel), PDCCH (physical downlink control channel) and the like. A downlink reference signal can be classified into a common reference signal (CRS) shared by all UEs within a cell and a dedicated reference signal (DRS) used for a specific UE only. Compared to a legacy communication system supporting 4 transmission antennas (e.g., a system according to LTE release 8 or 9 standard), a system including an extended antenna configuration (e.g., a system according to LTE-A standard supporting 8 transmission antennas) is considering DRS-based data demodulation to efficiently manage a reference signal and support an enhanced transmission scheme. In particular, in order to support data transmission through an extended antenna, it may be able to define a DRS for two or more layers. Since a DRS and data are precoded by a same precoder, it is able to easily estimate channel information, which is used for a receiving end to demodulate data, without separate precoding information.
Although a downlink receiving end is able to obtain precoded channel information on an extended antenna configuration through a DRS, it is required for the downlink receiving end to have a separate reference signal except the DRS to obtain channel information which is not precoded. Hence, it is able to define a reference signal for obtaining channel state information (CSI), i.e., a CSI-RS, at a receiving end in a system according to LTE-A standard.